Arizona FY 2017 NCHIP

The goal of the National Criminal History Improvement Program (NCHIP) is to improve the Nation's safety and security by enhancing the quality, completeness, and accessibility of criminal history record information and by insuring the nationwide implementation of criminal justice and noncriminal justice background check systems. BJS provides direct financial and technical assistance to the states to improve criminal history and other related records and to build their infrastructure to connect to national record check systems both to supply information and to conduct the requisite checks.

The Arizona Criminal Justice Commission (ACJC), will use NCHIP funding to address improvements to criminal history records information. The following projects focus on numerous NCHIP priority areas:

1) Maricopa County Attorney’s Office will continue to reduce the backlog of dispositions with the goal of improving the records and reducing the backlog by 60,000. MCAO will use the same work model from previous projects by using existing employees to manually enter the new dispositions during the day and offer overtime to resolve the backlogged dispositions.

2) Havasua Courts will fund a team of 9 court staff to research and complete the missing backlog of dispositions. The data clean-up project is designed to clear up the backlog of criminal cases that have not been reported to the state repository. The project will reduce the backlog of missing court dispositions and be accessible for criminal history inquiries at the state and national level.

3) Flagstaff Court will use funds to contract 2 FTEs to review the backlog of incomplete dispositions. The FTEs will review the disposition reports to determine whether reports need to be forwarded to another court, processed and resubmitted to the criminal history database, or retrieval of the associated case files and processing for completion.

4) Mesa PD will use funds for a microfilm conversion project. The Mesa PD currently maintains all police reports for cases between 1948 and 1997 on microfilm. The project will remove the original microfilm reels from storage, scan the images on microfilm and convert them to a PDF file. The Mesa PD will follow with a quality check to review the files for accuracy and uploaded into a RMS.

5) Pima Superior Court will use funds to reduce the backlog of dispositions in the court. The goals of the project are to reduce the current backlog of missing dispositions that still require data entry into the automated system, and increase the accessibility to the system by installing computer terminals in increase the number of electronic submissions.

6) Scotsdale PD will use funds for a microfilm conversion project. Prior to 2006, the Scotsdale PD completed department reports with handwritten information that were converted to microfilm. The project calls for converting 900 rolls of reports to PDF electronic records while indexing the reports and importing the files into a SQL for electronic reviewing.

7) Navajo County Attorney’s Office will use funds to purchase one Livescan device. The Livescan device will be installed in the Navajo County Court which will be used to fingerprint defendants during sentencing and automatically uploaded into the state repository and available to the national reporting systems.

8) Sahuarita PD will use funds to purchase one Livescan device. The Livescan device will be installed in the arrest processing area of the Sahuarita PD which will automatically upload all information into the state repository.

9) St. John’s PD will use funds to purchase one Livescan desktop workstation. The Livescan is an all-inclusive AFIS interface that will automatically upload information into the state repository and available to national reporting systems.

(CA/NCF)